Abstract:
In Multilingual society, Native speakers tend to learn a Second Language which
has become very popular in Sri Lanka after promoting the trilingual studies at
Schools, Universities and professional sectors and it also one important way of
fostering and perpetuating national unity in Sri Lanka. When the attention is focused
on Learning Tamil or Sinhalese as a Second Language as a beginner in the first
year at university of Jaffna and University of Kelaniya, it has been observed that
the learners who don’t have any knowledge in Tamil or Sinhalese as a Second
Language before the university entrance find it difficult to comprehend the concord
of sentences which include animate and inanimate nouns as subjects and the verb
‘to be. Particularly due to the interference of First Language learners of Second
Language find it difficult at the initial stage of learning the Language. Furthermore,
when constructing sentences the learners have the tendency to translate literally
following the syntactic rules of their first language. The study focuses on syntactic
difficulties regarding the Subject Predicate agreement of sentences encountered
by Native speakers of Tamil/Sinhalese Languages. Research sample of this study
limited to 30 students at beginner level of university of Jaffna and University of
Kelaniya. The data was collected by reviewing the questionnaire, analysing the
students’ performance and classroom observation were also done in order to gather
data. In conclusion this study helped to find out the errors regarding the concord of
sentences done by students and it is believed that this kind of study would facilitate
the teachers’ task of preparing teaching materials. Also it is recommended to teach
Tamil while comparing the grammar rules with Sinhalese.
